The collection you see here represents just the barest tip of an enormous iceberg of expressively compelling luxury menswear manufactured by Kiton. This label only dipped its alpaca-clad toe into Milan’s fashion arena recently—they must have hired a consultant—but they’ve been in business since 1968. Naples has its own particular language of tailoring. Jackets, so canvassed and armor-like on Savile Row and its acolyte markets, are profoundly pared-down in southern Italy: What looks like a jacket feels like a T-shirt. Kiton was the first house to coalesce Naples’s cottage industry of tailoring under one industrial roof; it now has 350 tailors hand-stitching its product in a facility on the outskirts of the city.
These pictures present a toned-down representation of the key Kiton aesthetic, but you could see the heart of the brand here on the rails; wide lapels, loose shoulders, and fabrications so soft to the touch they make a baby feel gnarled. The brand is quietly forward-facing: It has produced luxury sportswear for about a decade now, and has a denim line worked with Japan’s Kurabo that features slim European cuts and a less-slim American silhouette. Kiton is the nuts. Along with Berluti and Cucinelli, it is at the vanguard of Europe’s high church of luxury menswear, a brand unmediated by complicated theory, but rather based on simply exquisite practice.
